Ten people have been killed and hundreds evacuated from their homes after extreme weather and flash floods hit southern Spain on Friday.

The flooding, caused by torrential rain after months of drought, hit areas around Murcia and Almería in the south-east and Málaga in the south.

A 52-year-old British woman is believed to be missing in Almería, according to a government official. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said it was looking into the reports as “a matter of urgency”.

The weather brought down a motorway bridge and cars were swept away. Officials in the region said at least 600 people had been evacuated from their homes.

Spanish radio said a young boy and girl who were found drowned in a car in the town of Puerto Lumbreras were among the dead. A middle-aged woman was also killed in Lorca, which was badly damaged in an earthquake last year.

Jackie Broad, 58, said her home in Mojacar, Almería, was too high up to be flooded but she had seen cars get washed away by raging torrents of water. “The river at the bottom of our road has burst its banks. There was a lot of water, in some places up to the roofs of shops and houses.

“The water has run away now but it’s left about a foot of mud everywhere. A lot of the roads are closed so we’re having trouble getting around,” she said.

Five people have so far died in Murcia, three in Almería and two in Málaga. Five people originally declared missing have been found alive.

A tornado that also swept through the town of Gandia on Friday knocked down a ferris wheel, injuring 35 fair workers. The town hall website said 15 of the injured were seriously hurt. Local media reported that the fair had been closed to the public at the time.

The flooding disrupted transport links, with at least two motorways closed and one flight diverted to Seville from Malaga.

Spain’s weather agency said up to 245 litres of water had fallen per square metre in the area on Friday.

In 2011, a British couple died in a flash flood in Finestrat, on the Costa Blanca, after torrential rain caused a river to burst its banks.

The heavy rain is expected to continue throughout Saturday before moving towards the Balearic Islands.

A child stands at the edge of a flooded road in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA

A man has died after being swept away by floodwater as heavy rain and thunderstorms continued to batter much of England, Scotland and Ireland.

West Mercia police said the man was overcome by the water in a stream at Bitterley, near Ludlow in Shropshire, shortly after 10.30am on Thursday.

The accident was reported by witnesses and the man’s body was found after an extensive search involving police, fire crews and the Severn Area Rescue Association.

Residents named him as maths teacher Mike Ellis, who lived in the village with his wife.

The West Midlands, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Staffordshire all suffered heavy flooding during the day.

Later the storm spread north, closing both main rail lines between England and Scotland, with the west coast mainline closed at Tebay in Cumbria and a landslip blocking the east coast line near to Berwick.

At one point the Tyne road tunnel was closed in both directions, and police warned motorists stuck in traffic to stay with their cars until emergency services reached them. Residents in several locations across Tyneside had to be evacuated.

The Environment Agency urged people to be on alert for more flash flooding across the Midlands, northern England and Scotland as the Met Office forecast outbreaks of torrential rain across central and northern parts of the country. There was a continued risk of surface flooding if drainage systems were overwhelmed by rainfall.

The heavy rain could also cause rivers to rise rapidly, the EA warned, and it advised the public to stay away from swollen rivers and not to drive through floodwater. It also urged people to check its website and Twitter feed for the latest updates and flood warnings.

There were seven flood warnings in place for the Midlands, two for the north-east, one for the north-west and one for Scotland.

Flooding has also hit Ireland, where more than 50 homes and many businesses were flooded and several thousand left without power after 50mm of rain fell in a seven-hour period across Cork.

There were fears in Northern Ireland that overnight flooding which swamped Belfast could happen again. Further downpours were forecast as thousands struggled to clean up damage caused by flooding across the city and parts of Co Antrim.

Emergency services reported receiving more than 700 callouts linked to flooding in Belfast, while the region’s water authority said it handled nearly 3,000 flood calls, and 1,000 homes were hit by power cuts.

Flooding last year killed 470 people and impacted 9.1 million others, Kamal said.

In the worst-affected area of Sindh province, in southeastern Pakistan, the waters submerged more than 4.5 million acres of farming land, damaging an estimated 80% of cash crops.

Many in the country were at that point barely recovering from massive and deadly flooding in August 2010, which left a fifth of the country submerged by water, according to the National Disaster Management Authority.

Those floods lasted for weeks, affecting more than 20 million people and leaving 1,985 people dead, Kamal said.

Much of the land inundated in 2010 was in Punjab province, Pakistan’s breadbasket, where many people live off the soil and their livestock. Great hardship followed for millions in the wake of the flooding.

Monsoon floods in Pakistan have killed 371 people and affected nearly 4.5 million, the government’s disaster relief agency said on Friday.

Pakistan has suffered devastating floods in the past two years, including the worst in its history in 2010, when catastrophic inundations across the country killed almost 1,800 people and affected 21 million.

As in 2010 and 2011, most of those hit by the latest floods are in Sindh province, where the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said 2.8 million were affected, with nearly 890,000 in Punjab and 700,000 in Baluchistan.

Nearly 290,000 people around the country have been forced to seek shelter in relief camps, NDMA said in figures published on its website.

The floods began in early September, with nearly 80 killed in flash floods, mostly in the northwest and Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

An NDMA spokesman said the government was not yet appealing for foreign assistance.

“The government’s point of view is that the situation will be handled from own resources,” Ahmad Kamal told AFP.

More than a million acres (400,000 hectares) of crops have been destroyed by the floods across the country, NDMA said, and nearly 8,000 cattle have been killed.

UN children’s agency UNICEF, quoting a separate flood assessment, said at least 2.8 million people had been affected, including 1.4 million children, of whom more than 390,000 are under five.

UNICEF said it was providing 183,000 people a day with drinking water but warned it urgently needed more funds.

“Children from very poor families are among the worst affected by the severe flooding and they need our immediate help,” said UNICEF Pakistan Deputy Representative Karen Allen.

“UNICEF urgently needs $15.4 million to scale up its water, sanitation and hygiene response to reach around 400,000 people over the next three to six months.”

UNICEF said that according to its assessment, more than half of those affected by the floods were concentrated in just five districts, two each in Sindh and Baluchistan and one in Punjab.

It said 360,000 people had been left without shelter and three quarters of children in the five worst-affected districts were unable to go to school, either because the buildings have been destroyed or because they are being used as temporary shelters.

The UN agency voiced particular concern about children forced from their homes, saying loss of access to safe water supplies left them vulnerable to diseases such as diarrhoea, malaria, measles, polio and pneumonia.

More than 20,000 families in Sindh have been provided with hygiene kits including water purification tablets, UNICEF said, as part of efforts to prevent deadly water-borne diseases.

Torrential downpours in southern Spain have caused flash floods that have killed one person, swamped homes and swept cars down roads transformed into raging rivers. An official in the town of Alora says homes were destroyed and at least one woman was killed. Rescue workers are searching to determine if there are more victims. She did not have more details and spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with town policy. Images in Spanish media showed wrecked cars carried away by flash floods, rivers overflowing their banks and people sweeping muddy water out of their homes. The heavy rains started early Friday morning. The hardest hit area included Alora and other nearby towns inland from the Mediterranean city of Malaga.

Epidemic Hazards / Diseases

ScienceDaily — An isolated outbreak of a deadly disease known as acute hemorrhagic fever, which killed two people and left one gravely ill in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the summer of 2009, was probably caused by a novel virus scientists have never seen before.

Collecting samples in the Jungles of Boma in 2009 after the outbreak. (Credit: Courtesy of Metabiota)

Described this week in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens, the new microbe has been named Bas-Congo virus (BASV) after the province in the southwest corner of the Congo where the three people lived.

It was discovered by an international research consortium that included the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and University of California, Davis (UCD), Global Viral, the Centre International de Recherches Médicales de Franceville in Gabon, the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale, Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Metabiota and others.

“Known viruses, such as Ebola, HIV and influenza, represent just the tip of the microbial iceberg,” said Joseph Fair, PhD, a co-author and vice president of Metabiota. “Identifying deadly unknown viruses, such as Bas-Congo virus, gives us a leg up in controlling future outbreaks.”

“These are the only three cases known to have occurred, although there could be additional outbreaks from this virus in the future,” said Charles Chiu, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of laboratory medicine at UCSF and director of the UCSF-Abbott Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center, who spearheaded the UCSF effort to identify the virus. Chiu and his team continue to work on new diagnostics to detect the virus so that health officials in Congo and elsewhere can quickly identify it should it emerge again.

One odd characteristic of the Bas-Congo virus, Chiu said, is that while a number of other viruses in Africa also cause deadly outbreaks of acute hemorrhagic fever — Ebola virus, Lassa virus and Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever virus to name a few — the new virus is unlike any of them.

Genetically it is more closely related to the types of viruses that cause rabies, which are known to infect people with a very different sort of disease — a neurological illness that is uniformly fatal if untreated but may take months to develop.

An antibody test developed in this study was applied to the one patient who survived and to others who had come into contact with him. It suggested that the disease may be spread from person to person but likely originated from some other source, such as an insect or rodent.

The identity of this animal “reservoir” and the precise mode of transmission for the virus remain unclear and are currently being investigated by Metabiota and the central African members of the consortium through the PREDICT Project of USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats Program. (http://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/ohi/predict/index.cfm)

How the New Virus Emerged

In the summer of 2009, a 15-year old boy in a small rural community called Mangala village suddenly fell ill and developed a bleeding nose, bleeding gums and bloody vomit. He rapidly worsened, dying within three days of the first signs of illness.

A week later, a 13-year old girl who attended the same school and lived in the same neighborhood as the boy came down with a similar, serious illness. She declined just as rapidly and also died within three days. One week after that, the male nurse who cared for this girl began showing the same symptoms, and he was transferred to a hospital in Boma, a nearby port city that sits along the Congo River upstream from Africa’s Atlantic coast.

Members of the consortium, who had initiated a project to diagnose unusual cases of severe hemorrhagic fever, obtained blood samples collected from the nurse by the Congolese doctors and sent them to the laboratory of Eric Leroy, PhD, doctor of veterinary medicine at the Centre International de Recherches Médicales de Franceville in Gabon. There the samples were tested for traces of any known virus, but nothing was found. The Metabiota scientists then solicited the expertise of Chiu at UCSF and Eric Delwart at the Blood Systems Research Institute (BSRI) in San Francisco to aid in the diagnosis.

The researchers ultimately identified a completely new virus as the cause of the mysterious illness through a powerful strategy for identifying novel pathogens known as “deep sequencing,” in which millions of DNA sequences are generated from a clinical sample and then pieced together using computer algorithms combined with human analysis.

Distinct Attributes of Bas-Congo

The Bas-Congo virus belongs to a family of viruses known as the rhabdoviruses, a large family of viruses that infect plants, insects and mammals, including humans. The most famous member of this family is the virus that causes rabies. But even among the rhabdoviruses, Bas-Congo is something of an outlier, being very genetically distinct from other members of the family.

What’s most unusual about this virus, though, said Chiu, is what it does to people.

No other rhabdoviruses are known to cause the acute, rapid and deadly hemorrhagic fever seen in the three cases in the Congo. Rabies, for instance, can be a deadly disease if untreated, but the course of rabies in humans is nothing like the rapid and deadly onset seen with the Bas-Congo virus. There is some precedent, however, for hemorrhagic disease from rhabdoviruses in the animal kingdom: fish rhabdoviruses are known to cause hemorrhagic septicemia — acute bleeding and death — in affected fish.

The third patient had enormous amounts of BASV in his bloodstream just two days after he fell ill — more than a million copies in every milliliter of blood.

The BASV sequence was also used to design an antibody test for the virus, an effort led by Graham Simmons at the BSRI, another member of the consortium. Antibodies are blood immune proteins produced in response to an infection. The antibody test allowed the researchers to screen both the third patient with acute hemorrhagic fever and other people who had come into contact with the third patient, including the nurse who cared for him in the Boma hospital. High levels of BASV-specific antibodies were found in the third patient, establishing that he indeed had been infected with Bas-Congo virus. The same antibodies were also found in the second nurse, even though he never actually became sick.

“What this suggests is that the disease may be transmissible from person to person — though it’s most likely to have originated from some other source,” said Nathan Wolfe, PhD, founder and chairman of Global Viral, and a co-author on the paper. “The fact that it belongs to a family of viruses known to infect a wide variety of mammals, insects and other animals means that it may perpetually exist in insect or other ‘host’ species and was accidentally passed to humans through insect bites or some other means.”

The research consortium includes San Francisco-based Global Viral, Metabiota, UCSF, BSRI, as well as researchers with the Centre International de Recherches Médicales de Franceville in Gabon; the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in Montpellier, France; the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale, Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, TX; the University of California, Davis; the University of California, Los Angeles; Stanford University; and the Howard Hughes Medical Center.

This work was funded by support from Google.org, the Skoll Foundation, the government of Gabon, Total-Fina-Elf Gabon, and the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et Européennes de la France, the U.S. Department of Defense Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, Division of Global Emerging Infections, Surveillance Operations (AFHSC GEIS) and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (DTRA-CBEP), and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats Program, PREDICT project. Additional funding was provided by the National Institutes of Health provided via grant numbers R01-HL083254, R01-HL105770, R56-AI089532, and R01-HL105704 and by an Abbott Viral Discovery Award.

Riley Hospital for Children is back in operation after a mysterious illness resulted in a lockdown on Thursday. Seven adults got sick and four others were hospitalized Thursday due to an unknown substance they were exposed to inside the emergency room at Riley Hospital for Children at IU Health. All of those hospitalized have since been relased according to Riley spokeswoman, Abigail Gras. It all started with an odd smell, which Riley staff members confirmed, prompting a call to the Indianapolis Fire Department. At approximately 11:50 a.m., an IFD hazardous materials team responded, along with members of the Department of Homeland Security, to investigate a possible chemical spill inside the hospital’s emergency room. IFD spokesman Lt. Derrick Sayles later said there wasn’t a chemical spill. Crews were still trying to identify the mystery subtance that caused seven adults to fall ill at Riley, even though investigators admit they may never know what made them sick. “At this time, everything we found is inconclusive,” said Indianapolis Homeland Security Director Gary Coons at a news conference Friday afternoon.Marion County Health Department Director, Dr. Virginia Caine, confirmed the inconclusive findings, “We’ve used the most sophisticated tests that we have already,” she said. “Usually when you get to this stage, it’s very rare that you identify something later.” Riley says its hospital did everything right to respond: a major lockdown and extensive testing by Hazmat, the Health Department, even experts at the National Guard. They ruled out benzene and any gases associated with bio-terrorism. “Our monitors would pick up on any kind of chemical like that,” Coons told reporters. Thankfully, all 7 adults who were sickened reported no additional symptoms hours after exposure to the mystery substance, nor has any one else reported getting sick since it all began. Unfortunately, them may never know what made them sick. As of today, health officials report that we may likely never know what noxious substance triggered the hospital lockdown and caused people to get sick.

Biohazard name:

Unidentified illness

Biohazard level:

2/4 Medium

Biohazard desc.:

Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.

Climate Change

Glaciers on Svalbard are retreating rapidly. Credit: William D’Andrea (Phys.org)—Summers on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard are now warmer than at any other time in the last 1,800 years, including during medieval times when parts of the northern hemisphere were as hot as, or hotter, than today, according to a new study in the journal Geology.

“The Medieval Warm Period was not as uniformly warm as we once thought—we can start calling it the Medieval Period again,” said the study’s lead author, William D’Andrea, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “Our record indicates that recent summer temperatures on Svalbard are greater than even the warmest periods at that time.” The naturally driven Medieval Warm Period, from about 950 to 1250, has been a favorite time for people who deny evidence that humans are heating the planet with industrial greenhouse gases. But the climate reconstruction from Svalbard casts new doubt on that era’s reach, and undercuts skeptics who argue that current warming is also natural. Since 1987, summers on Svalbard have been 2 degrees to 2.5 degrees C (3.6 to 4.5 degrees F) hotter than they were there during warmest parts of the Medieval Warm Period, the study found. Researchers produced the 1,800 year climate record by analyzing levels of unsaturated fats in algae buried in the sediments of Kongressvatnet lake, in western Svalbard. In colder water, algae make more unsaturated fats, or alkenones; in warmer water, they produce more saturated fats. Like pages in a book, the unsaturation level of fats can provide a record of past climate. So far, most Arctic climate records have come from ice cores that preserve only annual layers of cold-season snowfall, and thus cold-season temperatures. But lake sediments, with their record of summertime temperatures, can tell scientists how climate varied the rest of the year and in places where ice sheets are absent. “We need both ice core and lake sediment records,” said Elisabeth Isaksson, a glaciologist at the Norwegian Polar Institute who was not involved in the study. “Here, Billy has found something that tells a different, more detailed story.” In looking at how summers on Svalbard varied, researchers also discovered that the region was not particularly cold during another recent anomalous period—the “Little Ice Age” of the 18th and 19th centuries, when glaciers on Svalbard surged to their greatest extent in the last 10,000 years and glaciers in many parts of Western Europe also grew.They suggest that more snow, rather than colder temperatures, may have fed the growth of Svalbard glaciers.

Evidence from tree rings and ice cores shows that southern Greenland and parts of North America were warmer from 950 to 1250 than today, with the Vikings taking advantage of ice-free waters to settle Greenland. Some regions also saw prolonged drought, including California, Nevada and the Mississippi Valley, leading some scientists to coin the term Medieval Climate Anomaly to emphasize the extreme shift in precipitation rather than temperature. A natural increase in solar radiation during this time was responsible for warming parts of the northern hemisphere, with a rise in volcanic activity from 1100 to 1260 causing milder winters, University of Massachusetts scientist Ray Bradley explained in a 2003 Perspective piece in Science. Bradley is a co-author of the Svalbard lake sediment study. Western Svalbard began to gradually warm in 1600, the researchers found, when the northern arm of the Gulf Stream, known as the West Spitsbergen Current, may have brought more tropical water to the region. In 1890, the warming began to accelerate, with researchers attributing most of the warming since about 1960 to rising industrial greenhouse gas levels. Ice cores from Svalbard, by contrast, show a slight cooling over the last 1,800 years. The conflicting evidence suggests that temperatures may have fluctuated more sharply between winter and summer, said Anne Hormes, a quaternary geologist at the University Centre in Svalbard who was not involved in the study. D’Andrea and his colleagues dated their lake cores by analyzing grains of glass spewed by volcanoes hundreds of miles away in Iceland. Those past eruptions— Snæfellsjökullin 170, Hekla in 1104 and Öræfajökull in 1362—all left unique chemical time markers on Svalbard’s lake sediments. “We know fairly precisely when these eruptions occurred, which is rare in the geologic record,” said study co-author Nicholas Balascio, a scientist at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Recent temperature measurements show that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, with sea ice this summer shrinking to its smallest extent on record. Natural feedbacks are amplifying the warming as loss of reflective sea ice causes the ocean to absorb more of the sun’s energy, melting more sea ice, which causes more energy absorption, and so on. Climate models suggest that by 2100 Svalbard will warm more than any other landmass on earth, due to a combination of sea-ice loss and changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation, according to the International Panel on Climate Change 2007 report. In a study published last year in the journal Advances in Meteorology, Norwegian researchers estimate that average winter temperature in Svalbard could rise by as much as 10 degrees C, or 18 degrees Fahrenheit.

Sinkhole

Is the growing sinkhole crises at Bayou CorneLouisiana worsening? Is the state of Louisiana, the feds and Texas Brine Company doing enough to protect the area, the residents and the region?

On Tuesday, a 30 x 50 section caved in pulling down more trees and part of an access road.

According to the Advocate, “Other developments regarding the sinkhole emergency have emerged in recent days, state and parish officials said:

Sonar testing results of a damaged Texas Brine salt cavern and samples of material found in the cavern are being analyzed to better understand what happened to the cavern suspected as the cause of the sinkhole.

Testing of hydrocarbon liquids from a Texas Brine investigatory well into the cavern may provide a definite link between the cavern and the sinkhole.

Another location where natural gas bubbles to the surface of area waterways emerged and samples of its gas emissions have been captured for testing.

In announcing their cavern sustained damage, Texas Brine officials said Monday that a tool used to measure the depth of the underground cavern found its floor is 1,300 feet shallower than when it was plugged and abandoned in mid 2011. That new, shallower point is 4,000 feet underground.

The company said the findings indicated “some type of dense material has fallen to the bottom of the cavern.”

Parish and Louisiana Department of Natural Resources officials are trying to get a better idea about the nature and amount of material found Monday inside the 20-million-barrel salt cavern, said Patrick Courreges, DNR spokesman.

The sinkhole has been in existence now since August 3 of this year, prior to Hurricane Isaac.

According to environmental attorney Stuart Smith, something smells. Smith, who has been critical of the state and Texas Brine and others, stated today in a emailer sent to the public:

The Louisiana Office of Conservation Commissioner James Welsh ordered Texas Brine Co. of Houston Tuesday to turn over all studies and data supporting its claim that tremors caused the failure of the company’s salt cavern in Assumption Parish, the agency said.

The order, which threatens fines or penalties for noncompliance, follows Texas Brine’s statement late Monday night that regional seismic activity damaged an abandoned company salt cavern that has been suspected as the cause of a 4-acre sinkhole erupting near the Bayou Corne community.

You read that correctly. Remember, this is the site were Texas Brine warned state officials more than a year and a half ago that there might be problems with the cavern’s integrity, and then neither the company nor the state lifted a finger this summer when the ground began to shake and gases began bubbling up from underground. And yet now Texas Brine is trying to pull a fast one by claiming the earth tremors caused the cavern to sink — not the other way around.

A federal official called out the company’s claim as preposterous:

But, in Tuesday’s statement from the Office of Conservation, researchers also studying the quakes disputed that claim.

William Leith, U.S. Geological Survey senior adviser for earthquake and geologic hazards, said that the USGS consensus is that the seismic activity detected in the area is a consequence of the cavern collapse, not the cause of the collapse and sinkhole/slurry area, the office’s statement says.

The bottom line just keeps growing bigger in Bayou Corne, and the ultimate bottom line is this: Somebody is going to have to pay for both the environmental carnage and the psychological stresses have been dumped on this small bayou community. Now Texas Brine has the audacity to portray this as an act of God, when clearly this crisis was created by humans acting recklessly. Even if the sinkhole swallows the entire town, it can’t swallow the truth.

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